Darren Smith

Darren Smith is a Partner with Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP. Darren’s focus is technology – he is interested in deep dives into electronic devices and using that understanding to provide clients with legal advice specific for the technology at issue. Darren’s background includes a Master’s degree in materials engineering and a Doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He performed research related to materials science and semiconductor manufacturing, and has past experience working as a programmer. With this technical background and fifteen years of legal experience, he can interface with engineers, inventors, experts, and other lawyers to counsel regarding intellectual property, transactions, and litigation issues and their impact on the overall business.

In addition to counseling and litigation, Darren assists clients before the U.S.P.T.O. and around the world in obtaining patent protection. Darren focuses his practice by leveraging his own technical background to assist clients in interacting with inventors to obtain clearly written and detailed descriptions of inventions. Darren’s work includes preparing patent applications in a diverse range of technical fields, but focusing on telecommunications, circuitry, medical devices, camera systems, semiconductor devices and manufacturing, and applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence to applications in autonomous driving, image processing, and data science.

Darren’s technical expertise includes semiconductor devices, semiconductor packaging techniques, semiconductor fabrication processes, circuit design and simulation, magnetic devices, processor architecture, dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and flash memory design, wireless devices, and computer software. Darren has knowledge and experience with standards-based technologies, including 2G, 3G, 4G, Bluetooth, and WiFi wireless standards, wireline interfaces for RDRAM, DDR DRAM, and flash memory, and H.264, H. 265, and H.266 video coding standards.

Previously, Darren conducted research in the field of magnetic storage and magnetic devices. His research focused on developing new lithography and etching techniques for massively parallel processing at sizes smaller than 25 nm. These new techniques were used in fabricating and studying bit patterned media, a technology for expanding magnetic recording capabilities. During his research he authored or co-authored over a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles in engineering and science journals and presented at several magnetic materials and nanotechnology conferences.